Joel McHale Hits Back After Chevy Chase Bashes ‘Community’: “He Stopped Hurting My Feelings In 2009”

Joel McHale seems like he could not care less about Chevy Chase‘s criticisms of Community.

McHale easily dismissed the actor’s recent claims that he felt like the Emmy Award-winning series “wasn’t funny enough” for him, saying he often felt like he “didn’t want to be surrounded” by “those people,” referring to his cast mates.

But the former Soup host had one response to Chase’s criticisms of the show: “The feeling’s mutual.”

“He stopped hurting my feelings in 2009,” McHale told People. “I was like, ‘Hey, no one was keeping you there.’ I mean, we weren’t sentenced to that show. It was like, ‘All right, you could have left if you really wanted that.’”

He appeared to be completely unsurprised by Chase’s statements.

“But yeah, you know Chevy. That’s Chevy being Chevy,” he said.

Chase abruptly exited the show in 2012 in a”mutual agreement,” according to The Hollywood Reporter. According to previous reports, Chase was known for clashing with series creator Dan Harmon and making “racial cracks” about his co-star, Donald Glover.

Despite Chase’s criticisms of the show, the rest of the Community cast is expected to reprise their roles for a feature-length reboot of the series, which is anticipated to release on Peacock in 2024.

Fans were worried that Glover would not be able to return for the reboot, but Harmon recently assuaged everyone’s fears by confirming production will be shifting from Los Angeles to Atlanta to accommodate the actor’s other projects.

“The thing that’s going to matter most to me as an audience member or to anybody who loved that show is seeing those people see each other,” Harmon recently told THR. “And they still love each other, and it’s not going to feel the same if you’re shooting them separately at different months in different locations.”

Harmon maintained that he and his co-writer Andrew Guest are working to get a finished script before they begin production. He hasn’t revealed much about what the movie will be about, but reportedly pitched it to streamers and studios as a “Greendale Community College reunion.”

“I don’t want these now-superstar people, like Emmy-winning Donald Glover, who are bothering to gather out of loyalty to this thing, to come back and once again be getting blue pages run down by an intern that totally contradict what they spent all night memorizing,” he said.

“I want to have a veneer of, ‘Here’s your reward,'” Harmon continued. “I don’t want them to go, like, ‘Oh, he’s learned nothing, he’s treating us like cattle again.'”